"Self Compassion and Beauty" with Marissa Knox
"Self Compassion and Beauty" with Marissa Knox
Marissa is a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She also works as a research assistant to Kristin Neff. In her work, Marissa focuses on exploring how self-compassion acts as a source of resilience for healthy body image and stress management. Her dissertation, in particular, examines whether or not a self-compassion writing intervention helps college students reduce body image concerns.
Marissa offers so much wisdom here: how to relate to our bodies, others, and ourselves from a place of compassion and kindness. Her words and insights are such a strong and beautiful contrast to the world’s often-unforgiving beauty standards.
The Interview
Audio engineering: Podcast P.S.
The Interview Transcript
Melissa: Yeah. Well thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it.
Marissa: My pleasure. Thanks for initiating the conversation.
Melissa: Oh yeah. Your research sounds so fascinating.
Marissa: Yeah, I enjoy it a lot. I find it to be some of the most important work. I'm glad you're interested in that too. And it seems like you do a lot of adjacent and parallel things, some of your work.
Melissa: Yeah, I mean for sure, I noticed. I mean I don't know all of what you do, but for sure I was really drawn in by just a few things that you mentioned.
So how I usually like to start things is just kind of get a sense of… I like to have people speak about the work that they do and what brings you to the conversation on beauty. Would you be open to saying a few things about that? Some of the work you do?
Marissa: I would say, my name is Marissa Knox and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. And I focused my research on self compassion and particularly how self-compassion plays a role in healthy body image, emotional resilience, reducing stress.
And I also have a job at UNC Chapel Hill right now, where I'm working at their student wellness center. And a lot of my work is around supporting peer educators and the workshops that they do around campus to create a culture of belonging and compassion and respect and collective liberation and joy on that campus. So, I really enjoy the work I do with them as well.
Melissa: Yeah. Could you say, you could say as much or as little as you want to say about this, but I'm just so curious about what drew you to the work of studying self-compassion?
Marissa: Yeah, it's very personal. I don't know if you've heard the phrase “me-search,” but oftentimes researchers do research on things that are like relevant to themselves. So, it's like researching themselves.
And, so, it very much came from my own struggles to love and accept myself growing up, particularly around body image actually, but often just a holistic challenge with being okay with myself and having confidence and trust in myself. And so it really was kind of a stereotypical thing where I was in therapy and my therapist recommended Brene Brown's book actually, The Gifts of Imperfection.
And I remember when I heard that title, it didn't make any sense to me how “gift” and “imperfection” would be in the same sentence. And that was definitely a clue of how important that work is for me about accepting so-called imperfections and anyways within that work of Brene Brown, I discovered the work of Kristin Neff around self-compassion.
But it really goes back even further to my own mom and how she would try to support me when I was having a hard time. She would say, "You’ve got to be your own best friend," and I always thought that's what best friends are for, that best friends are the ones who are supposed to build you up. But she kind of had been whispering the self-compassion truth to me all my life.
So, the work just resonated with me and really was what I was looking for and what I needed. And from there it just became this kind of calling or desire to bring these teachings, this awareness of how compassion and kindness and wisdom are already available within you and not outside of yourself and not in some better version of yourself.
So, it just feels really meaningful to spread that truth and to also see it as connected to social change and how the relationship we have with ourselves is really the foundation for how we relate to others.
And, so, I like expanding it out beyond just me.
Melissa: Thank you. I just love hearing the background around that. I just find self-compassion research fascinating. So, I love hearing kind of people's stories of how they come to it. Thanks for explaining that.
Marissa: Yeah, of course.
Melissa: So, I have some questions around beauty that I would love to, just kind of given your area of research and your own journey, if you wouldn't mind just kind of..I mean does that sound like an okay place to go next, to kind of transition into some questions around beauty?
Marissa: Yes.
Melissa: Okay. So, the first question I like to ask people tends to be kind of a big one, but the question is just around how do you define beauty?
Marissa: Yes, I love that question. I love defining words for yourself and I will just cite a source that has been an inspiration for me around beauty. And that's John O'Donohue and he is a beautiful writer and he talks about beauty a lot. So that's just a background of where some of my inspiration comes from.
I'd like to define beauty as just a recognition of what is sacred and whole in whatever you're experiencing.
And I always think about this moment when I was standing outside and I watched this tree be kind of drenched in sunlight and there was a breeze blowing the leaves. And I witnessed how the elements of nature were interacting to create this beautiful moment.
And I think beauty is in recognizing that interconnectedness of how when things come together, it's just a miracle to witness.
And without the wind I wouldn't have been able to see the leaves shimmering on the tree. Without the sunlight, the leaves wouldn't have been illuminated in that way. Without the tree, I wouldn't have been able to notice the breeze or notice the way light and shadow play together.
So, everything has its role in creating beauty and to see that wholeness, instead of oftentimes beauty is like picking apart body parts or just picking apart aspects that are beautiful versus not beautiful.
I think beauty is a sense of wholeness and seeing the sacredness of all of it coming together.
Melissa: I love that. I love John O'Donohue too. I love that you draw on him. So, you gave the one example of the tree. I'm always interested to know though, just where generally in the world do you see beauty? You mentioned wholeness and anything that's sacred. So those are pretty encompassing. But I don't know if anything else comes to mind.
Marissa: Yeah, nature is my biggest teacher spiritually and about beauty I would say.
But I see beauty in ordinary moments too. Just watching my sister's dog take a drink of water. There was just such a sweetness in that moment I remember or meeting my niece for the first time was a moment of meeting such beauty and seeing someone do something kind for somebody else, beauty.
And I love sparkly things and I think a lot of what my inner child finds beautiful is really fun to reconnect to. So, it can be whatever brings me a sense of joy or pleasure is something beautiful. And sometimes it's beautiful and I feel tears coming as I watch Grey's Anatomy or something.
So I see and feel beauty in lots of places, both ordinary and extraordinary.
Melissa: I'm always curious to know too, has that been like a journey for you to have your eyes and your heart open to beauty in a new or different way?
Marissa: Yes. Well, it's something that since I was young, I just noticed I paid a lot of attention to little details. I think maybe it had to do with birdwatching as a kid. I, I went to bird camp.
I love that I was drawn to do that, but it really teaches you how to pay attention to small things in the environment that normally we just walk on by or drive by and don't notice the life around us.
So I think those skills taught me how to pay attention to even the way a lot of, I don't know if it's tar or what material it is, but I love when the sidewalk or the street is sparkly. I don't know if you've ever noticed that, but just noticing those details or even, something, the way the water is flowing in the gutter or something that doesn't normally seem beautiful.
I just attuned myself to that and it definitely is a discipline and a practice to step away from all the distractions we have, to notice those things.
But I find that's such a nourishing moment to notice, “Oh wow, look at the way that spiderweb is getting caught in a sunlight or something you just would totally dismiss in a busy moment.”
Melissa: Thank you for explaining that.
Marissa: Sure
Melissa: Another thing that just always fascinates me is having, I mean also thinking about having new eyes as we seek out beauty in the world. My next question is around experiences of brokenness and if anything comes to mind in terms of like an experience of brokenness that you had and then in the midst of that if for where you saw beauty breaking through or noticing beauty.
Marissa: Yes. Well I have a cliché experience of breaking my fingers actually and that was a heartbreaking and physically broken moment for me.
I really was so disappointed in myself that I had let myself get to the point where I broke my fingers trying to do a handstand. It's relevant to this work on body image, right? Because I was practicing yoga from a very striving and perfectionistically oriented space and that is definitely not the intention behind those ancient sacred practices is to try to do it so you can achieve things and get a picture of it.
But that's where I was at that time and I was really ego-driven and striving for that handstand and I ended up breaking my fingers and couldn't practice yoga for many months.
So, I had to face a lot of judgment toward myself around injuring my own body and I had to face shame and it was really painful. I really broke my own heart when I did that to myself, but thankfully I had the presence of mind to realize that yoga is more than just the physical movements.
And it really opened up my mind and my heart to a more spiritual practice of meditating and that's where I really started to reconnect to nature and I couldn't move my body how I used to, so I would take a lot of walks and it was also just a time of where self-compassion was really nurtured.
It's in those moments where you're in a place of pain and brokenness and there's a lot of mud and muck that you are faced with your own strength of self-compassion. That's when it comes through.
So, it was one of the most valuable lessons for me for sure. But it was full of a broken heart.
Melissa: And then did it transform or transition your experience with yoga practice or anything going forward after that then?
Marissa: Well, it took a while to have a healthier relationship with moving my body. I struggled in college to kind of have that perfectionism around exercise and finding a good relationship with my own body image and striving.
And, so, even though that was a lesson, I still have had to learn it, of how to relate to moving my body from a place of appreciation for what it can do versus trying to accomplish more or make it better.
But I have learned through meeting my niece, was really another pivotal moment to see the body as this holy vessel, that I don't want to exercise it or feed it so it looks a certain way, to achieve some certain form of beauty but because it's my home, it's the ways that I experience the world, through this body, and I want to respect it and have a deep appreciation and reverence for it.
So I'll move because I enjoy it and it feeds my body to move it, but not from a place of, “Oh I got to get that, that move down” or whatever. I've learned that that's not the right thing for me.
Melissa: Thanks for explaining that. I definitely can resonate with pieces of your story too for sure. So, thanks.
So kind of… in my mind, this may be connected, but the next question I'm curious about is just lies about beauty that you've experienced and if any of those come to mind?
Marissa: Yes. I think the idea that beauty is fixed or determined by media or by social norms, it's something that you can buy or you can reach out and grab and that beauty comes from outside of you. I think is one of the biggest lies.
And this is beauty in the sense of body image, but beauty in the sense of what makes a beautiful and successful life.
There are so many ways that we are told lies about beauty being something we have to achieve, accomplish, purchase.
And it can always be this moving target of bigger and better versions of beauty. I think all of those things are lies. That beauty is on the other side of achieving some goal or on the other side of weighing a certain amount or on the other side of the mountain. The grass is always greener or whatever.
So those lies I think translate beyond the body but they are lies that the people in my life internalized to varying degrees and then they raised me and shaped me and so it's hard to escape them. They're quite pervasive lies.
Melissa: Yeah. You had mentioned the research that you do as well around college-age women and body image. And I don't know if you could answer this directly. I don't know if lies is the connection there or maybe if just generally like what you're learning about beauty in that research. I would love to hear more about that if that's something that you're open to talking a bit more about.
Marissa: Yeah. Well, I think it is accumulation of internalizing the lies of what it means to be beautiful.
And in the United States a lot of the beauty standards are set by cisgender, white, heterosexual, thin women that look like Barbie doll or they're skinny and curvy in all the right places.
And I think even though there is a lot of work being done to change what's being shown to us in the media, it's still very deeply ingrained that that's the beauty standard and that most of the women that we're going to see are going to have clear skin and minimal hair and no scars or cellulite or stretch marks or any other signs of humanness.
And so I think the college women, and I know this was my experience as well, when you are and faced with choosing your own meals that you eat more often and maybe your exercise routine is changing and you're also just growing up.
There's a lot of hyper-focus on what your body looks like and control on what you feed yourself or how much you exercise. And, so, a lot of the women I'm researching are talking about these concerns that they've had for a long time.
And I think in college is when there's a perfect storm of things to make it worse.
Melissa: I hadn't thought about that. Like you said, kind of all of those factors coming together and then, additionally, like if they're in a dorm situation with other, like living closely with other women and watching maybe their practices or comparisons that come up. Wow. So, have you come out with like any, I'm not sure if your research, is it more qualitative or I don't know if there are any findings that you're coming up with or?
Marissa: Well, yeah. So, there is research already on how self-compassion is a valuable skill to develop for people who struggle with body image and with eating disorders as well.
And my research, the analysis is very, very rough. I haven't finished collecting my data, but I have a hunch that for people with pretty moderate to severe body dissatisfaction, that we need more intense interventions that involve people being in community with each other.
The workshops that I've led around body image, one of the most impactful parts of them is just for women to get together and have an experience of belonging and shared humanity that they're not alone.
And it's hard to create that experience in an online writing intervention because you're still, you're only hypothetically thinking of other women like you.
And there's something powerful about really being in the presence of other women.
So, I think something like a quick writing activity can help change some of those really harmful thought patterns that, “I'm not good enough” and “if I don't look a certain way I hate myself.”
We can work with that with writing activities, but to really transform body image, I think the culture has to change and that can happen more effectively in groups of people because it creates like a little mini-culture in the workshop and there's this sense of possibility of, “oh yeah, if all of us in this room really chose to see ourselves differently and to appreciate ourselves and to not compare ourselves to each other, how much can we empower and uplift each other?”
And there's a taste of what that kind of culture could be like in a, in-person workshop.
Whereas it's harder to imagine that when you're just by yourself journaling online.
Melissa: Yeah and like new narratives are part of community, which like you said, can happen online and there's so much that happens in person, how we can sync up even. Yeah, okay, cool. Thank you for explaining that. I find it just fascinating.
Marissa: Yeah, I think that there's a lot that can be taught online and there's some…self-compassion encompasses this element of common humanity, in the sense that our struggles and difficulty are a part of being human.
And even if the conditions are unique, our identities and our backgrounds and our relationship to the institutions we're in are different, that emotional quality of grief or anger or shame is similar.
And when we connect from that place that we're in this human mystery together and something really powerful happens.
So, I think there's a combination of learning these skills, changing your thought patterns, creating new habits of self-love and also seeing how that connects to a greater whole of other people.
Melissa: Yeah. Thanks for going a bit more into that.
Marissa: Sure.
Melissa: Yeah, really helpful to this conversation. The last question I have is just around how are, like your own experiences, if there have been any that have transformed your ideas about beauty in particular?
Marissa: I mentioned this before, but I'll say in more detail how meeting my niece for the first time. I'm the youngest in my family and didn't have really young cousins around me. So, I wasn't around children growing up.
And when my sister had her first daughter and I was holding her for the first time, it really brought me into contact with this miracle of what it is to be alive and be human.
Because my niece didn't do anything to earn love. She was just existing, she didn't accomplish anything or, she was just sleeping and eating and pooping. But there was this like overwhelming sense of love for her and reverence for the miracle that she just was created inside my sister's uterus was just mind-blowing.
And it occurred to me that that miracle of my niece is the same miracle in every single human and we just have forgotten.
And so if we can re-learn to see ourselves as this miraculous vessel that we get to touch the world with and experience and have connection with other people with, it just shifts your whole relationship to your body.
And to how you see beauty because you see the miracle of, as I was saying, the trees with the sun coming through them and what a miracle it is that we can even perceive that or the miracle that we can listen to music and feel the rhythm. The miracle of having this conversation across states and time zones.
And, so, there's just such an appreciation that comes through remembering the miracle of being alive. And I think that's an experience of deep and profound beauty.
Melissa: Well, thank you so much for entertaining all my questions and talking about your research as well. I'm interested too in the workshops that you offer. Is that something that you, do you do that often or do you travel for that? What does that look like?
Marissa: Yeah, well, so there's workshops that I've done through an organization called Embody Love Movement and I’d love to plug them.
They are an incredible organization and it's all about shifting the conversation from self-criticism to self-acceptance and self-compassion and really showing how when we take all the energy we often expend towards our body image and the concerns about how we look in our appearance, we free that up to be put towards what we care about in the world. Like what our passions are, what we're called to do.
That's when real change can happen, when we can put our energy towards what our heart is called to do in this life.
And, so, the workshop takes you through a really great trajectory of critiquing the systems that we're in, having some media literacy and discussions about our culture and how it kind of perpetuates these toxic ideas about beauty and then guides you to reclaim a sense of love for who you are and the strengths and qualities and talents you already have inside of you.
So, the Embody Love Movement has facilitators all over the country of the United States but also there are facilitators in other countries across the world. And I highly encourage people to look them up and see how they can be involved in that organization. It really is [a] very empowering organization.
And then I personally, I'm interested in leading workshops that kind of blend self-compassion and body image and integrity and all of that into a mix. So, stay tuned for those. I hope to be developing and teaching those sometime soon.
Melissa: Okay, cool. And are you living in North Carolina then or?
Marissa: Yes.
Melissa: Okay. North Carolina. Okay.
Marissa: Yes, so I'm here now and the future is very unknown. My partner's looking for jobs, so who knows where I'll be next year.
Melissa: Sure. We will have to stay tuned I suppose.
Was there anything else like in preparation for today or in the midst of this conversation that you were thinking about or something I didn’t ask about that you'd like to, to state or mention?
Marissa: I think just remembering to have a sense of I don't, let me see, I'm trying to remember who this quote is from. I think his name is John Tarrant, who's a Zen teacher.
And I will paraphrase his quote to say, I think attention is the most basic form of love and I think we can cultivate a sense of intimacy and relationship with beauty just by paying more deep attention to what it means to be alive in this moment, what it means to feel and experience the ebbs and flows of emotions and thoughts, and beauty is always accessible.
Even if it's just a glimmer of a fingernail or something. It can be something so seemingly ordinary, but just learning how to pay attention can really enrich someone's experience of beauty.
Melissa: I love that quote. Thank you.
Marissa: Yeah.
Melissa:That's great. Well, those are all the questions I have for you and I am really just so grateful that you took the time to do this and share a bit about your work and what you've learned in the midst of it around this topic.
Marissa: Yeah, thank you. I'm trying to think, for my research, I don't have my data analyzed yet. So, I don't want to mislead anyone, but I do think there is power in redefining beauty as a community and being in person and there's power in the relationship we have with ourselves and learning to speak to ourselves differently.
So even if it is just a simple journaling prompt to work with your body image or to work with something you're struggling with, I don't want to say that that's not valuable. I think there's a lot of change and growth that can happen there, and I think it can grow even further when we do it with other people.
To find out more about Marissa Knox, click here.
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